Britain suffers continued flooding as Brown blames climate change

the real worldJul 24th, 2007 - 21:09:42

Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said Thursday the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed.
DNA of trees, plants and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest.

That contrasts sharply with the prevailing view that a lush forest of this kind could only have existed in Greenland as recently as 2.4 million years ago, according to a summary of the study, which is published Thursday in the journal Science.

The samples suggest the temperature probably reached 10 degrees C (50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer and -17 C (1 F) in the winter.

They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages, 116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F) higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt away.

'These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken,' said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a co-author of the paper.


'What we've learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought.'

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more reality: WIMB reportJul 24th, 2007 - 21:12:26

May 2007 will go to history as one of the coldest starts to climatic winter ever observed in South America. A brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow and major energy disruption. The death toll for the 10-day cold wave was the highest for any single weather event in Argentina in recent history.

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Old oil spinJul 24th, 2007 - 21:15:37

Since all cold weather reports are old oil spin, thought I would throw one in:AN UNUSUAL cold snap in Italy has knocked out cellular telephone
links, killed homeless people near St Peter's Square and, to the
population's growing alarm, caused mysterious ice blocks to tumble
from the sky.

Experts have been puzzling over the chunks of ice since since last
weekend, when the first blocks crashed on to a school in the northern
city of Padua.

On Tuesday a man in Ancona had a narrow escape when a block weighing
3.3lb landed on his head as he walked to work. Massimo Giunchi, 24,
suffered only minor injuries because he was wearing two hats to
protect himself from the cold.

In Marino in the Alban Hills, south of Rome, the groundkeeper of a
golf club discovered an ice block said to have weighed 11lb as he was
making his early-morning rounds. Just before midday in Milan, a
'pumpkin-sized' ice chunk crashed on to a street.

Rome's city council and the Vatican have earmarked special funds for
the homeless after the deaths of seven people living rough in the
capital since the Pope declared 2000 a special Holy Year to mark the
advent of the third Christian millennium. The victims included a
devout Austrian Roman Catholic woman, who died close to St
Peter's Square.

The owners of mobile telephone handsets were told not to leave them in
cars or outdoors as the freezing temperatures could damage the liquid
crystals in their displays.

Record temperatures were registered around the peninsula including
-27C in Livigno in the Sondrio province of Lombardy, -17C in Umbria
and -23C in the Abruzzo ski resort of Ovindoli. Reports from the
Vatican said that it was the coldest weather in Rome for 200
years.

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Another WIMBJul 24th, 2007 - 21:20:56

While much of Europe seems to have been stuck in a depression for weeks on end now, summer 2007 is surely going to go down in history as one of the coldest on record. Currently above 3000m, you would be forgiven for thinking that Christmas was just around the corner! Last week in the Mont Blanc region alone, nearly 70cms of new snow fell around 4000m and another 30-40cms has come down since Sunday. As a result, all this new snow is creating a very unstable snow pack at altitude and many of the rescue call outs in recent days have been resulting from avalanches rather than rockfalls.

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